


For Want Of A Horse

by spoke



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-19
Updated: 2011-12-19
Packaged: 2017-10-27 12:56:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/296085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spoke/pseuds/spoke
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>A belated but very sincere thanks to my beta, laura! I am so sorry I forgot to do this.  :(</p>
    </blockquote>





	For Want Of A Horse

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



> A belated but very sincere thanks to my beta, laura! I am so sorry I forgot to do this. :(

So. If he made any sudden moves, the rooster was clearly going to attack. He had never thought he would be in this situation again. (1)

The problem with very angry roosters, from Moist von Lipwig’s perspective, is that you absolutely could not charm them, or even stare them down as you might a dog. Dogs mostly come preprogrammed with the idea that you, as a human, are automatically In Charge. Even the ones trained otherwise can generally be persuaded with generous offerings of meat. It was a moot point, given that he had no meat either, but a point nonetheless.

Nor any seeds or small insects, come to think of that, and he wasn’t quite desperate enough to offer a finger as a substitute for worms. Besides, there wasn’t anything in the beady avian eyes in front of him except murder. “Come on. I wasn’t anywhere near the hens!”

That much was true at least. He had only been trying to cross the yard to reach the barn, which would be a much warmer night’s sleep that the field he had been previously contemplating. (2)

He was just considering his odds of finding a tree he could climb in the pitch black when a light shone across the yard. This had the wonderful effect of blinding the rooster for a moment, though unfortunately it did the same to him.

“Who’s out there?” asked a distinctly female voice of what was, shall we put it delicately, a respectable age. “I know I heard someone, and if you don’t answer I’ll let the dog out!”

No, you heard something, namely your damned homicidal chicken. And if you have a dog I’ll give up aliases. Still, he’d have better luck with the lady than the tiger - er, chicken. (3)

“Hello, ma’am. I am sorry to have bothered you, but the coach was set upon and I barely escaped...” he trailed off for a moment, telling himself it was meant to convey exhaustion and harmlessness and not because he was actually exhausted - harmless was debatable, depending on your definition of harm. He was fairly sure that his fellow passengers in the coach considered themselves to have been harmed by his skill with cards, for example. “May I please sleep in your barn? I promise I won’t be any trouble and I’ll be gone in the morning?”

She seemed to take a long time deciding, though Moist was aware that his patience was running unusually thin lately. “You can stay in the barn, Mr. Stranger, but you’ll do some chores in the morning before you head off anywhere. We know each other in these parts, and no bandits here would actually harm a fellow as long as he didn’t fight them. And you, Mr. Stranger, don’t seem the fighting type to me.”

He climbed slowly into the hayloft with a certain gratitude that there were no cows to contend with, even though the fact filled him with a quiet foreboding. If there had been sheep, maybe it wouldn’t have worried him, but he didn’t remember hearing any of those either. In a place this far from cities, if there’s no livestock, there generally isn’t much in the way of money...

His last thoughts before he dropped down into merciful oblivion were full of annoyance at the existence of little old ladies and the way so many of them seemed to see through him. Although at least this one wasn’t feisty.

***

When the morning came, far earlier than he would have liked, he learned a few things. The first was that he had been right about the cows, and the region in general - it wasn’t likely this place had seen a horse in years.

The second was that while Miss Flitworth was definitely old, there was something about her that forbade the use of the word ‘little’. There was steel behind those eyes, and though Moist had been about to introduce himself as Richard Cummings, he quickly changed it to Edgar Smith. It wasn’t a name he had used before, and he didn’t have a personality for it, but it seemed to satisfy Miss Flitworth. The other name didn’t bear thinking about.

So he found himself doing the chores with a certainty that if he did run out on her, one or more of the good old chaps in the tiny excuse for a town would end up chasing him. Probably they couldn’t catch him, given his long experience in the art of skipping town and the complete lack of horses, but he somehow didn’t have the energy. Not after being kicked out of the coach and rolling part of the way down the mountain, anyway. Some people really could not take a loss.

Edgar Smith, he decided, really did not like hard work.(4) He liked women though, and fast horses, and clothes that were sharp and flashy. He worked it all out in his head, the accent and the furniture that he’d have to wait on until he’d gotten out of this horrible little town. It made getting chores out of the way quicker, and he actually needed the bloody miserable sixpence because he’d left all his tools on the coach. He needed a better way to keep track of things than that, maybe little pockets like some of the guys he’d worked with had.

Edgar had probably never needed to make ends meet in a tiny town with depressingly honest(5) residents who had nothing worth charming them out of in the first place.

***

He’d been there for a few days before he had managed to become just Edgar instead of Mr. Wentworth, or that chap up at Miss Flitworth’s. It was an improvement by local standards, even if he was dying of boredom by his own.

Then he went into the town for the sake of getting away from the stifling atmosphere of the farm. He’d expected it to be the same as it had been every day before, exchanging one air of mind numbing boredom for another, and he almost made the mistake of smiling when he saw the sour expressions on everyone’s faces. Something was up, and if he was lucky, it was someone he could bring down.

First things first. He headed over to the bench the old men used to sun themselves. Only one of the regulars was there. “Where’s everyone gotten to today?” he asked, all polite concern.

“Th’ damn Revenoo rode in last night.” said Spigot, and spat on the ground.

Wonderful. Moist thought, but said, “Well. They’re always trouble, aren’t they.”

“Might say that, Edgar, might say. Of course, none of us has done anything that deserves worrying about, but you know how Revenoo are.” He was glaring, Moist noticed, at the mayor’s house. Even a town this small had to have someone to hold responsible, and to throw the Revenoo at apparently.

He had to laugh to himself, he really did. He’d never had a thing to do with taxes in his life. But it wasn’t hard to imagine the kind of person who’d get this sort of reaction from the locals. “Determined to find something wrong, right? Like it’s their job to poke their noses into other people’s business.”

He nodded firmly. “Can’t do an honest day’s work with the man around. It’s a cryin’ shame.”

He smiled as he felt himself beginning to wake up. Time to start living again. “Well, I could see to it that he’s crying, if you and the boys are willing to play along?”

Spigot grinned. “Could do, Edgar. What’re you thinking of?”

“To start with, I don’t suppose anyone has a decent suit I could borrow?”

***

He’d had to go up to Miss Flitworth’s for the suit, which had apparently belonged to her father, and that was a conversation he hoped never to have the like of again. Nevermind that some idiot old country voice in the back of his mind wasn’t quite at home with the thought of wearing a dead man’s clothes, even in these circumstances. But the departed Mr. Flitworth had apparently been a man of some taste, and more wealth than should strictly exist in a town like this, which went a long way to explaining the reason a woman that hard and straightforward could look right through Moist and not mind what she saw.

So he was able to wander into the bar looking reasonably out-of-town, with a Cripple Mr. Onion deck in a pocket.

He was quite happily thinking along those lines when he saw the Revenue man and stopped dead. Although not literally. The bastard was a classic image of an evil taxman as featured in Moist’s recent imaginings(6), but that wasn’t the problem.

The problem was one of the townsfolk sitting there being harangued by the man, and more specifically the skeleton standing behind them. The honest-to-gods skeleton, and the host of prayers his mother would be saying if she’d been alive, ha, to see it. It was as plain as the rather impressive nose on the farmer’s face. It even had a bloody scythe!

Clearly he’d been stuck in this backwater way too long, that was it. He still kept his eye on the gruesome tableau and its more unwitting participants as he made his way to the counter, though.

He’d managed to keep relatively calm about the whole thing, until the taxman walked away from the scene and D - the hallucination of a skeleton left with the farmer. It looked almost resigned? Sad? His conscience was trying to grow back, that’s what it was, and he’d spent such a lot of time making sure it would stay dead.

Then it turned just before it walked out the door, and he could have sworn that it winked. Choking on his whiskey probably helped when the Revenue man came to the counter, though. Looking like he was out of his depth helped sometimes, and he wanted to seem like he had something to hide.

“Come here often?” he asked, relieved that his voice at least didn’t show the shock he’d had.

The look the man gave him said he wasn’t interested in conversation. “Not very.”

He responded with a careless smirk. “Shame. It seems like a nice enough town. Good liquor.” C’mon, I don’t want to spend a minute more than I have to here...

Of course he sneered. Because some people have to make things too easy. “The town may be nice enough, but I’m afraid the residents are nothing more than petty criminals.”

The thing about people with sticks up their arses is that they’re so blinded by their own bloated sense of righteousness that they can’t pay attention to the world around them properly. Someone who wasn’t so secure in being the most intelligent person in the room might have realized Moist was cheating, for example. (7)

A couple of hours later, Moist was able to lay down a perfectly believable Great Onion, due to the man no longer being able to count his own fingers. It wasn’t his proudest win, but it didn’t matter. He was being quite firm with himself on that point.

What mattered was that he had the horse. Also a fair amount of money, but the horse was the important thing. If it could carry this bastard all the way out to the middle of nowhere, it could take Moist anywhere he wanted to go. Say, for example, someplace with even better horses, and alcohol that would allow him to forget that he had ever been here.

Mr. Revenue was dragged away to sleep it off in the cellar of the mayor’s house, and after some friendly celebration of the feat, Moist excused himself to head up to Miss Flitworth’s and return her father’s suit. He was not, he would have insisted had there been anyone asking, doing this out of the goodness of his heart. He was doing because that voice in the back of his brain hadn’t quite shut up since the bar, and really thought that Death might be following the damned suit, and he was a little tired of wearing a dead man’s clothes anyway.

She came to the door with the usual not quite frown on her face, and handed him his own clothes, and it was a close thing that he didn’t scream and run off because it’s standing right there, how does she not know it’s there!

The thing was not to panic. That was important. Just get out to the barn and change and leave, that will fix everything. Which he hurried off to do, and was just starting to feel a little relieved when he heard someone behind him.

In Miss Flitworth’s barn, population 1. He cringed before taking a deep breath and saying, “Hello?”

HELLO. A voice that he could only think of as intoning rather than speaking responded.

“Well. Ah. I hope we don’t have an appointment, ahaha.” Get a grip, before he does!

NO. SOMEONE ELSE HAD, BUT YOUR ACTIONS ...CHANGED THINGS.

Moist really hoped that wasn’t disapproval he was hearing.

I WAS MERELY INTERESTED THAT YOU COULD SEE ME. NORMALLY IT IS ONLY THOSE OF A MORE MAGICAL PERSUASION.

“Ooooh, no. I don’t have anything to do with magic, that stuff’s dangerous.”

I SEE.

There followed a pause in which Moist was half convinced that Death was waiting for him to make a false move before pouncing like some horrible cat, and Death simply waited. It was, after all, part of the job specification.

“So... I’ll just be going now? See you around?” Not if I can bloody well help it I won’t.

EVENTUALLY, EVERYONE DOES. he replied, and Moist could have sworn he sounded tired. Which it might have, if he had been going to think about it, but he didn’t plan to think about anything very closely for quite some time after this. He just backed out of the building slowly, because like hell was he going to turn his back whether it mattered or not.

Once he was far enough away that he couldn’t really tell if he was still there or not, he turned and broke into a run for Miss Flitworth’s. He heard himself talking to her in a kind of blur, his thoughts already in Psuedopolis or somewhere equally far away and filled with wonderful distractions.

It wasn’t until he was miles away and walking the horse that he realized he’d headed off in completely the wrong direction.

***

(1) Incidents with angry roosters will leave quite an impression on a young mind, chiefly that one should avoid barnyards as a matter of principle. Present circumstances couldn't be helped.

(2) Although much smellier.

(3) Really he'd been told he was being quite silly, but he had refused to get out of the tree until the rooster was taken away and butchered.

At least they told him it was butchered, but this was possibly a lie meant to get him to come down.

(4) He had never yet developed a false identity that did enjoy it, but entertained the notion it was possible in the same way he occasionally entertained the thought of flying - provided he never tried, nothing horrible could happen.

(5) For a given value of honest.

(6) Suit. Tie. Stick clearly sitting so far up his rear that the handle couldn't see daylight, and such a visible lack of imagination that he was in fact sucking the ambient imagination out of the air around him.

(7) It wasn't very likely, especially since the bartender was being very generous with the drinks. But he might.


End file.
